GEOLOGICAL. 191 



You can easily understand that, were your body now 

 suddenly turned into stone, a part of the last meal of 

 which you were a partaker would become a fossil : and 

 don't forget that the word " fossil " means " dug " (Latin, 

 fossus), and that it refers always to the remains of plants 

 or animals dug out of the earth's crust, changed into a 

 stony subtance. Now, were your body so transformed, a 

 portion of your undigested food would be found a stony 

 conglomerate inside some part of the thirty feet of that 

 intestinal canal of yours, would it not? Now, that is 

 exactly what this is. In Cambridgeshire there are vast 

 beds of this stone found, called " coprolites." Once upon 

 a time, in that county, long before its splendid colleges 

 were built or any student or any human being was to be 

 seen there, in the dim misty ages of the past most likely 

 millions of years ago, this county was inhabited chiefly 

 by that large tribe of reptiles to which the crocodile and 

 shark belong : they " lived and died and were buried," as 

 the newspapers have said of a very rich man, perhaps 

 all they could say without saying much that was worse, 

 these reptiles lived and died and were buried; that is, 

 their bodies sank in the element in which they lived, and 

 absorbed the earthy matter which received them, and 

 which formed their graves ; and, gradually, they became 

 fossilized, and remained for us of the nineteenth century 

 to " dig " out of their long, very long, hiding-place. 



You may guess the character of these living beings in 

 the early records of the life of our little world from the 

 object before you, and you will be surprised when I tell 

 you that, in this county of Cambridgeshire alone, so much 

 as a million and a half of sterling money of our country 

 was recently paid for coprolites per annum, which, at the 

 then current value of sixty shillings a ton, would ba equal 

 to from 400 to 500 thousand tons. These Cambridgeshire 



